The FCC’s Brutal Regulation to Enterprise

Should the Internet, regulating Facebook (Messenger) be next?

If I am in a desperate situation, I should be able to type “911” on my Messenger screen and connect to my local Public Safety Answering Point because Facebook knows exactly where I live right?

At this point your desk phone will most likely get more punishment than say WMUR-TV Manchester getting their license nixed in the coming year.

The Federal Communications Commission is pushing another mandatory obedience to 9-1-1 call tracing, and if you thought Kari’s Law was bad, wait till you hear Ray Baum’s Act. This forces anyone with a phone system (like a PBX or a Key system) to provide detailed information. If you are a small creative office with no weird cubicle numbers, you may need to add C1021524BC-AD at the way I’ve read the law. Some enterprises are on the 3rd floor in a different suite, the reason why the telco carriers do not have this in their 9-1-1 database that is only activated when a 9-1-1 call is placed and forwarded to the PSAP is amusing.

Hell if I don’t give PayPal my specific location for a package, may not get the Buyers Victimization Program Protection! (Oh sorry “Buyer Protection Program”.)

In the days where little Gen. Colon Powell’s little kid, Michael ran the FCC, the spirit of Voice over IP and 9-1-1 routing was a hands off approach. In reality, prior to the Kari Hunt incident of 2013, they were even more closer to having general consensus on how 91-1-1 calls on private property would work.

(And when you prefer the boys club like him today… that shows you how extreme the FCC has lost it, refusing in the spirit of protecting America’s radiowaves.) The problem is that the younger Powell running the FCC under a Republican admin, like the GOP in general, was the party of yesteryear. When Kari’s Law and Ray Baum’s Act had been developed, a political style was developing: White Grievance. Another obs was narcissism (not taking personal responsibility of situational awareness), entitlement (the expectation “9-1-1” should be the only number even in a private property), and scapegoating (the PBX/MLTS was the one that really killed Kari) not a man of which previous accounts described their relationship as “estranged” and the motel meetup was “arraigned” and the brutal murder of “Hunt-Dunn” (Cisco refers her as hyphenated surname) was never the fault of the killer, of which local media reported he got 99 years in prison and despite The Spirit of Texas’ strong views on capital punishment, he’ll be locked up instead.

But… Multi Line Telephone Systems, Key Telephone Systems, whether they are digital or TDM or VOIP based, were the ones that killed Kari and delayed in saving the live of Ray Baum.

The parent company of Kensington should make millions and billions to put their signature “locks” on many of the VOIP phones not to be snatched, but ensure that 9-1-1 will get the right room, cube or desk space because not all phone systems have the ability to be user based not extension based. For instance Avaya treats extensions numbers as users, so if a person “hot desks” they don’t have to literally move their phone, whereas Cisco, Polycom and other hard phones have the extension number hardened to the phone device itself which makes moving cubes easier, but the information that may identify them in a time of crisis harder. But Avaya was the Official Sponsor of Kari’s Law and they declared bankruptcy a year before it got signed into law by POTUS Trump and company has never been the same since.

It’s sad to see chauvinism in technology worsen over time like how a narcissistic creep that don’t age really well. This is the FCC. And I am not holding my breath for the FCC to go back in their lane and rip WMUR-TV’s license once and for all with their alleged news product Newsnine of which they spend more time acting like a fascist media outlet and never covering the stories in their City of License. Or hell WZID (FM) focusing on the 51% of the menopause to death female audience and indirectly boxing men in the 603. But talking about broadcast media, should be in it’s own post instead.

The issues between DevOps and General Enterprise Technology

In the Facebook outage, it reminded people that you can’t trust a company which thinks they have only a few million users, when they don’t accept they work for a trillion dollar enterprise. This meaning that Facebook’s servers and services are more consumer-class than enterprise class or worse the braintrust is very weak.

It’s important to note, that even though the Internet Protocol is in itself a software stack (think of this as an “extension” or “driver”), but software engineering, web apps, etc., is in itself a different skillset. People who have used Microsoft’s Windows Server solutions really do not know much about IP networking. For many years, the Server editions came with a DHCP server, how many of the Microsoft certified admins know more about DHCP other than it gives IP address at the local level to get out onto “the Internet? I have suspected about VOIP deployments in the past, where NT admins didn’t understand “DHCP options” and alike because you know it’s more important to manage an Active Directory.

Look at Microsoft’s own VOIP systems, it fell shorter beyond Cisco’s Unified Call Manager, and obviously the Avaya, Nortel, Mitel or Shortels of the world. It’s sad when a Cisco can do better. This has a lot to do with Microsoft’s DNA of everything being software and talking to Microsoft’s own blueprint. Anything that routes outside a data center of an in house, on prem Microsoft solution is something Microsoft doesn’t get, and their software shows it. If it has to hit a Cisco, or needs to interact with a Cisco IOS, well good luck to that.

The Session Initiation Protocol part of Voice over IP was yet another rip-off from the traditional telephony, and was created by application people, since SIP was based off the Web standards or HTTP technically speaking if it’s a device talking to another machine. In a lot of ways SIP was designed almost like cell phones because a telephone number is basically a URL, and when you hear the “dial tone” it’s a fake noise to assure the user to replicate it’s a phone. Because the people who developed SIP didn’t understand enterprise voice systems, its basically like a landline with all the 19 potential features you could add on to your home hardwired or broadband phone service, because the people who likely created it looked at their POTS phone and assumed the same.

What a bunch of assholes to make an ass out of themselves.

Understanding software and an imaginary world is the worst thing to have in DevOps, of which is the new IT department fusing move-fast-and-break things punky coders, and wife beating sysadmins who hate change, but preach it to their “end users” or “lusers”. It’s kinda ironic that either type of man typically lacks software of another sorts, people. Understanding people. The IT world needs to be reformed to really not be the evil world to their fellow employees, and they need to stop jacking off to the C-suite, to help them save money by cutting jobs to their own people. This kinda goes full circle of the way money and influence is killing society with Facebook and their technical approach. If you are building a social network, that isn’t based on empathy, you are certainly going to cause rift amongst the people who are using your service.

Techie No-Nos – On DNS…

For security purposes and ensuring you’re not clogging your own low voltage pipes, your “DNS address” should be local. If you use Google or your ISP’s DNS address any connection to your local devices can only be accessed by IP addresses because you have no way to have a DNS point to a name to a host with an numeric IP address.

Local IP addresses are kinda like the FRS radio bands, ones that ISPs are expected to not route for the purposes of having a local area networks routable.

Anything from:

10.0.0.0 to 10.0.0.255
172.16.0.0. 172.24.255.255
And 192.168.1.0 192.168.254.255

The local DNS address should point out to the firewall or wireless router. Many smaller end devices have the ability to basic DNS if you have a few devices where you want to connect them by domain-name.

With all these cyber attacks, it’s best to separate what’s exposed to the overall Internet, and what should be local. Computing devices should be connected with a local IP and DNS address and appliances that help route local devices to the overall Internet should be the ones with the most exposure like having the Google DNS address.

Just do the right thing, and keep your devices protected with a better structured local network

The Lack of Joy with Email

I used to love email. I seriously thought it was more professional, more methodological and more formal and more meaningful than text/SMS or chat/IM, etc.

Other groups of people who either do not respect the medium or have given email a bad name.

I thought owning a BlackBerry was cool, but one of the big flaws was I couldn’t have full IMAP email, then I went onto the iPhone in December 2011 and realized how cool it was to have an entire inbox on the palm of my hand like I could on my desktop. (POP3 is perfect for small email servers or the ol days of dialup, where once it downloads onto the client, it “pops” away off the server, is the non technical way to describe it.

But with everything, joy disappears. The alleged honeymoon period lasted a decade plus.

It wasn’t necessarily the tech, but the people on the other end. Apparently I showed too much love to email that people took advantage of it.

In the last year it got worse. People in professional circles would send me longwinded emails with up to twenty sentences per paragraph. The biggest pet-peeve was the excessive, liberal use of High Priority, and was used completely indiscriminately. It was more of “Look At Me, Smell my ugly Pits! I am so great you must drop everything and you’ll get back to me!” Worse was professionals would accidentally send out emails; with the failed attempt to recall emails – assuming I am an Exchange shop (of which I am not), and that the email would magically disappear. Do these people realize no one is using Outlook in the masses as much? In fact I haven’t used Outlook in years! I still liked the overall Outlook interface; but do not support the O365 approach.

I also had clashed with the millennials, and intra-generation fights. One former professional was so overwhelmed of a 2 page email, despite it being properly written with appropriate sentences per graphs and it being outlined. Younger people today treat email like SMS or chats; I find that alarming because this leads to a culture of inappropriate communications and if you mix Slack-talk in email, it can really bite you if a discovery is required. I think chat-like emails are more apparent then than back in the 90s or early 00s by boomers and Gen Xers.

The biggest pet-peeve was the excessive, liberal use of High Priority, and was used completely indiscriminately. It was more of “Look At Me, Smell my ugly Pits! I am so great you must drop everything and you’ll get back to me!”

Oh the multi-thread replies… that was the worse. If developments occurred over the weekend, I had “professionals”; would literally react to every reply. If say there was an instance where I had threads, both were responsive replies, one was a correction to the other, the person would still react to all three and personalize each one. This individual was under high stress and was known in circles for being a chain-smoker. The job didn’t need to be high-stress to begin with.

The joy is no longer. There is no sense of happiness as much as I used to. This isn’t because my responsibilities changed; it’s the other groups of people who either do not respect the medium or have given it a bad name.

How to Implement Cisco Call Manager Express at Home, part five

Session Initiation Protocol

In 2020, as previously mentioned SIP is replacing most of the desktop phones. SIP stands for Session Initiation Protocol. H323 or SIP is neither better or worse of standards, it only differs how the phones connect and disconnect calls. Cisco’s SCCP uses H323 standard, even though the protocol itself is proprietary. Your routers IP address handles the configuration (buttons and lines, sometimes for the user like backdrops and ring tones), the time clock (the time of day and day of the year), the signaling (the tones), and the transmission (the human conversation). SIP could do any of the four things and could be separate devices on separate networks.

The basis of the SIP “stack”/protocol/extension supports

Video chats
Audio calls (err the traditional telephony)
Instant Messaging (known as “texting”, “messaging” or “chat” if someone has been born after 1994
The basic SIP telephony stack supports essentially all standard 19 Custom Calling Features that the phone company used to provide separately, that many broadband phone companies provide for free or is included at a much lower price rate.
The protocol literally revolves around Caller ID. “Display Name” and “SIP Alias” is equivalent to the “station-id name” and “station-id number” in the FXO ports respectively in the IOS configuration if you wanted to do ethical caller ID spoofing.)

Continue reading “How to Implement Cisco Call Manager Express at Home, part five”